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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of March, 2017.

Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)March 22, 2017(comments)
Microsoft continues the war against their own users. A Microsoft shows up to paste a boilerplate fauxpology, then immediately contradicts it in followup apologetics. A small phalanx of Hackernews is angry this 'bug' sat untouched for months prior to gaining social media notoriety; their whining is used to kick off several dozen pages of pointless bickering about "New Microsoft," Linux being too hard, and the proper way to inform your customers you don't give a shit about them.

US Senate votes to undo FCC internet privacy rulesMarch 23, 2017(comments)
The United States Senate continues the war against their own users. One Hackernews suspects some kind of massive federal conspiracy to censor comments on reddit.com. Another suddenly realizes that people might disagree about things for reasons other than ignorance, and becomes distressed. The rest of the comments are people arguing about technical methods to work around the user-tracking they implement in their day jobs.

Google Talk Is Being DiscontinuedMarch 24, 2017(comments)
Google continues the war against their own users. The XMPP Memorial Society trades barbs about whose fault it is that a misdesigned overengineered shitshow of a protocol failed to gain traction amongst non-erlang enthusiasts. Every single messaging platform in current existence is held up as Obviously The Future. Hackernews tries to figure out what Google's master plan is, and why Google is working so hard to make it look like aimless poorly-managed floundering. IRCv3 continues to be a retarded pile of solutions to the wrong problems.

Deep Photo Style TransferMarch 25, 2017(comments)
Some academics figure out how to make pictures look like other pictures. Hackernews is super-excited about the day this functionality will be built into their cameras, continuing the tradition of using other people's code as a substitute for competence. One subthread breaks up into the "I can always tell/No you can't" teams regarding pitch correction. Maximum Hackernews is achieved as the sentence "I am too stupid to understand the context of academic research" is expressed as "now if you implemented this as a web app, i'd be sharing it with everybody"

How much your computer can do in a secondMarch 26, 2017(comments)
An internet posts a series of pointless questions. The conditions of the quiz are left deliberately vague with the sole exception of the gcc optimization flag. One Hackernews points out that computers are almost entirely wasted by programmers, which of course leads to a chorus of insistence that Electron is great and software sucks because project managers are stupid. The rest of the comments consist of useless bickering over implementation details in the quiz. The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce speculates on when they can move on to shitting up web development.

Next.js 2.0March 27, 2017(comments)
Some webshits continue the war against their own users. They post a product announcement for their new webshit. Loading the page in a browser comprises over a hundred megabytes of traffic; eighty megabytes of useless video and nearly twenty megabytes of json. lynx --dump output contains all the same pertinent information in 20kb. Hackernews is very excited about this amazing new technology, except for those who are fans of a competing product. Several pages of partisan bitching ensue.

The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protectionsMarch 28, 2017(comments)
The United States House of Representatives continues the war against their own users. Hackernews is outraged, presumably because the rules will now enable other companies to compete with Google in the lucrative Fuck Everybody's Privacy market sector. The entire comment thread is just Hackernews arguing about political shit and deciding which elected officials are betraying the American people. Not a single goddamn Hackernews makes the obvious connection to the shit they do at work all day for a living. The tacit consensus: Hackernews isn't bad for creating the tools of surveillance capitalism; Congress is bad for letting people use them.

Explain ShellMarch 29, 2017(comments)
An internet makes a website to help lazy people understand things. Hackernews has discussed this exact site at length several times over the years; the only new fold is that one Hackernews wants it to use TLS, the better to paste passwords into it without feeling bad. Another one ran a forkbomb. The words "man page" do not appear anywhere in the linked discussion or the vocabulary of its participants.

SES-10 MissionMarch 30, 2017(comments)
The Muskonauts post their latest launch on Youtube. Hackernews thinks their kids will give a shit whether Elon recycled rockets. The hilarity of Hackernews expectations of the near future is not outweighed by the repetition of the typical Hackernews output on space travel: space is not worth exploring, yes it is, nobody will use this, yes they will, and then six thousand pages of bad economic theory.

Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial NetworksMarch 31, 2017(comments)
Some academics figure out how to make shit in pictures look like shit in other pictures. One Hackernews notices that the machine learning papers have largely stopped relying on mathematics or any other scientific endeavor; the others are ready with reassurances that someone will get around to formal research sooner or later. All this stuff is super worthwhile in the meantime because we can just keep passing around training sets verbatim and treating them as infallible, just like we do with node.js libraries! Both the machine learning community and the web development community are completely free of charlatans! Scout's honor!